Detonator
by malanthropy
Summary: Starbuck encounters a revelation of sorts. Takes place in the last part of "Flesh & Bones." Major spoiler warnings. R&R!


Author's Note: I'm really hoping nobody else came to the same conclusion, because otherwise this is just a dead plot. This story has a **MAJOR SPOILER WARNING **for the ending and various religious philosophies in Flesh & Bones. It might be confusing towards the middle, but I hope—gahds, I hope—that you can figure out what I was trying to say. If you can't, all that it requires is a little bit of thought.

Rating: It's BSG we're talking about. It has to be at least PG. No real gore or nudity, but I **did** use "frak" a couple times, which implies that someone's trying to swear, which… you get the picture.

Disclaimer: If I owned it, you wouldn't be reading this anyway. Since I don't own it, you may read and enjoy heavy detail.

She just stood there for a moment, taking it all in. She flicked her eyes across the scene; the President wore her eyes slanted upwards and her mouth barely creased towards her eyes in the cold smile of victory as she spoke words of "deadly machines" and extermination that contradicted her position even thirty seconds ago. The incapacitated Viper pilot heard her speech as if in a dream, for all of the words blended as Leoben turned around behind the inches-thick plate of bulletproof glass that separated him from her and the ship from space. The pupils of his imitated eyes hid behind the hair he had messed up—no, he hadn't done it; she had. Kara Thrace was the one behind his suffering; she was the torturer. Her face twitched visibly as she kept standing, staring, leaning on the crutch. All was silent, if for just a moment.

Then a hand made its way to the glass; dirtied, bloodied, but flesh all the same. The eyes remained resolutely downcast, the look of one who has been betrayed but never deserved it. Her eyes wandered around his features as her breathing became heavier and heavier, knowing that Leoben—Cylon or human—would die. She started wondering why, why hadn't he just cooperated? Why had he made up the lie about the warhead? Why all the riddles, the head games, the God-talk?

And then suddenly, her mind was silenced entirely as if in the calm before the storm, as one, bold thought came upon her;

**There IS a warhead.**

Her pace slowed as a sudden onslaught of thoughts came rushing past her with the force of a hurricane. Unlike normal thoughts, these did not slip through her fingers, but instead came crashing through and just eroded them, reaving her mind with sheer power; Kara desperately tried to keep up, her consciousness just as impaired as her leg. Images of cancer, the Holocaust, Cylons, warheads, small streams, her mother and even the Lords of Kobol were all focused at and rushing towards the Cylon behind the glass with one palm outstretched on an invisible wall, fingers pressed against it; her only possible escape was to walk with her mind, towards the airlock.

With her eyes still unpeeling from Leoben, she made the one possible conclusion that could've come from his facial expression. "He's not afraid to die. He's just afraid that his soul won't make it to God," she said, her voice trembling.

She shifted herself around and began limping towards the glass sheet, her mind still hurling itself against the pane and the silent man behind it. The clicking sound her crutch made against the floor was unnerving, like a high pitched metronome against a much faster tempo that was only surviving on the thunderous crescendo of the new thoughts conceived and old ones rising with them. Her breathing was quieter now, as if dwarfed by the immensity of what it was surrounded by, as she stood right by the glass, and almost, if not quite, right next to Leoben.

Yes, there was definitely a warhead. "It's just not nuclear," she whispered under her breath, the windy undertones of her mumble echoing far across the thoughts that so eagerly splayed themselves across the inside of her mind; then, as if called by the words of recognition, the crescendo stopped and the images faded away, because she'd done it. She'd figured it out, she'd figured everything her Cylon interrogatee had been throwing at her. She watched him as he smiled; not with his mouth, but instead with his eyes. The training that taught her how to torture had been the same as the training that taught her what to see; she bit her upper lip, realizing how ironic it was.

She heard a fist slamming on a button as if it were a mile away. The airlock opened, and Leoben was ripped away by the vacuum that was their only environment. She stepped back from the glass wall and stared at it for a second.

Leoben had been there to conduct sabotage. To stick a nuclear warhead among the Galactica ships so that one, or maybe more, would be frakked up beyond all recognition.

That would be the general description of a suicidal religious terrorist, at least the ones she had heard of from Caprica; the radicals with so much G4 strapped around their waists they could probably force their innards to erupt in a pre-set pattern if they wanted to. Leoben was definitely religious, but suicidal terrorist just didn't fit. If the Cylons were going to attack after Leoben had done his job and every ship was at least 500 clicks from one another, they would've; machines don't frak up their calculations.

And Leoben's sabotage didn't involve setting a nuclear warhead or spreading the ships apart at a distance enough to be destroyed easily individually.

His mission… was Lieutenant Starbuck.

He was a detonator of a warhead not for something that destroys and is eventually forgotten, but something that grows and must eventually be acknowledged. A detonator for the sabotage of a world both surrounded and engulfed by war.

A renaissance; a revolution of thoughts, that's what his mission was. Not to kill, not to destroy, but to get one person, even just one person, to embrace the fact that there was a way for both human and Cylon to co-exist that didn't involve servitude, hatred, or suffering. Funny, she thought, how Leoben's warhead was the best Viper pilot in the C.A.G. and one of the best shooters the Galactica had. Suffering, whether it was her own or someone else's, was her life. It was her job.

It had been that way all her life; Leoben had already proved that. If something seemed wrong, it was always you, not the world. You're the cancer. At least, that was her mother talking.

And he'd just preached at her about how worthless it was. Because now, she was the cure for the cancer the world—or what was left of it—had inflicted upon itself. Hadn't racism left their lifestyles years ago? She felt a sudden shivering sensation that this had all happened before. _Destiny,_ she mused.

Her name kept repeating from a distant world, over and over, but suddenly she heard it clearly as she lurched back into reality. "Lieutenant Thrace, we're leaving now," the President said sharply.

As if a goodbye to the imitated aural leftovers of Leoben, she spoke to the glass. "Destiny calls," she mumbled, breathing her words in and ticking her head to the side as she exhaled with a mock smirk at her reflection, her usual moving-irritates-me gesture. The President waited by the door until Kara managed to limp her way out of the room. The former school teacher followed behind, and a security guard shut the door closed behind them.

She looked back through the glass as she turned the corner, towards the door that would take her away from the interrogation room. She moved aside for the President to go through the door, but waited for a moment before she walked through. She placed her palm against the glass again, like she had done to the airlock wall. The Cylons were more than just machines.

After all, if a toaster could pray to God…

end-

Oh, right, one last thing before she kills me; thanks to Quindolynn for both beta-ing and helping me find the toaster quote in the F&B transcripts. Read and review if you liked this, and if you didn't review anyway and criticize me as much as you feel it's necessary.


End file.
